match that current challenge to a previous situation
and then uses that past experience as a guide for
how to act. Every time we instinctively react to a
stop sign or wait for people to exit an elevator before
entering, we rely on automatic processing’s pattern
matching to determine our choice of action.

Our “associative machine” can be amazingly adept
at identifying subtle patterns in the environment. For
example, the automatic processing functions are the
only parts of the brain capable of processing information quickly enough to return a serve in tennis or hit a
baseball. Psychologist Gary Klein has documented
how experienced professionals who work under intense time pressure, like surgeons and firefighters, use
their past experience to make split-second decisions. 7
Successful people in these environments rely on deep
experience to almost immediately link the current
situation to the appropriate action.

However, because it relies on patterns identified
from experience, automatic processing can bias us
toward the status quo and away from innovative
solutions. It should come as little surprise that
breakthrough ideas and technologies sometimes
come from relative newcomers who weren’t experienced enough to “know better.” Research suggests
that innovations often result from combining previously disparate perspectives and experiences. 8
Furthermore, the propensity to rely on previous
experiences can lead to major industrial accidents
like Three Mile Island if a novel situation is misread
as an established pattern and therefore receives the
wrong intervention. 9

That said, unconscious processing can also play
a critical and positive role in innovation. As we have
all experienced, sometimes when confronting a
hard problem, you need to step away from it for a
while and think about something else. There is
some evidence for the existence of such “
incubation” effects. Unconscious mental processes may be
better able to combine divergent ideas to create new
innovations. 10 But it also appears that such innovations can’t happen without the assistance of the
conscious machinery. Prior to the “aha” moment,
conscious effort is required to direct attention to
the problem at hand and to immerse oneself in relevant data. After the flash of insight, conscious
attention is again needed to evaluate the resulting
combinations.

The Discipline ofProblem Formulation

When the brain’s associative machine is confronted
with a problem, it jumps to a solution based on experience. To complement that fast thinking with a more
deliberate approach, structured problem-solving
entails developing a logical argument that links the
observed data to root causes and, eventually, to a solution. Developing this logical path increases the
chance that you will leverage the strengths of conscious processing and may also create the conditions
for generating and then evaluating an unconscious
breakthrough. Creating an effective logical chain
starts with a clear description of the problem and, in
our experience, this is where most efforts fall short.

A good problem statement has five basicelements:• It references something the organization caresabout and connects that element to a clear andspecific goal;

• it contains a clear articulation of the gap between
the current state and the goal;

• the key variables — the target, the current state,
and the gap — are quantifiable;

• it is as neutral as possible concerning possiblediagnoses or solutions; and• it is sufficiently small in scope that you can tackleit quickly.

Is your problem important? The first rule of
structured problem-solving is to focus its considerable power on issues that really matter. You should
be able to draw a direct path from the problem
statement to your organization’s overall mission
and targets. The late MIT Sloan School professor
Jay Forrester, one of the fathers of modern digital
computing, once wrote that “very often the most
important problems are but little more difficult to
handle than the unimportant.” 11 If you fall into the
trap of initially focusing your attention on peripheral issues for “practice,” chances are you will never
get around to the work you really need to do.

Mind the gap. Decades of research suggest that
people work harder and are more focused when they
face clear, easy-to-understand goals. 12 More recently,
psychologists have shown that mentally comparing a
desired state with the current one, a process known as
mental contrasting, is more likely to lead people to
change than focusing only on the future or on